Rolls-Royce Wraith

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Overview:
The Wraith is derived from the Ghost, but it has its own personality. Fitted with a 624-hp version of the Ghost’s V-12, the wheelbase is shortened, and the fastback body is unique. The Wraith is quicker and sportier than the Ghost, with a light touch to the steering and a gently controlled ride. Rolls-Royce tradition abounds, with rear-hinged power doors, the available Starlight headliner, and a wide array of bespoke options that can launch the already-stratospheric base price into high orbit. First Drive Review – 2014 Rolls-Royce Wraith »

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2014 Rolls-Royce Wraith

Ghost in the machine.

It is a historical curiosity that when Rolls-Royce first used the Wraith name way back in the late 1930s, the company sold only the running chassis. Independent coachbuilders supplied the bodies, built to reflect the owner’s particular (and sometimes peculiar) taste. These days, the new Wraith’s running gear traces its ancestry to corporate overlord BMW, while the body is the portion that defines a modern Roller as both distinct and distinctly British.

Odd, then, that the Wraith’s fastback roofline—the car’s defining feature—was cribbed from a couple of Italian cars. You see, Rolls has no precedent for a roofline that looks anything like this, so its designers couldn’t play the heritage card. According to design director Giles Taylor, the inspiration comes instead from the Lancia Aurelia coupe and the Maserati Ghibli (the original coupe introduced in 1967, not the recently introduced sedan of the same name). In profile, in person, this car looks spectacular and improbable. It’s such a massive and unexpected thing in any setting you can imagine. And it’s so gloriously space-inefficient, so unchained from the tedious priorities of regular cars. The sharp crease between the roofline and the brutal, bricklike shape of the lower body serves to make the Wraith one of few modern cars that looks totally appropriate in a two-tone paint job.

The Wraith is longer than a Chrysler minivan, seats three fewer people, and has more than double the power. They both have two power-operated doors, though.

Contrasting paint notwithstanding, the new Wraith has been cast as the performance-minded Rolls-Royce, though the company is eager to add that the Wraith is no sports car. So just in case you thought a 5500-pound, 17-plus-foot-long vehicle with power-operated doors was a sports car, know that you would be wrong. The Wraith’s 624-hp twin-turbocharged V-12 is the most powerful engine offered in any of the company’s cars, and we expect that it will carry the Wraith to 60 mph from a standstill in 4.3 seconds. And it will do so with a measured thrum from the exhaust that only plays background to whatever soundtrack you’ve chosen to pipe through the Naim audio system.

It’s more powerful and quicker than the Ghost sedan, which served as the donor car for this monstrous coupe. The company chopped more than seven inches from the Ghost’s wheelbase to create the Wraith. But, at 122.5 inches, the coupe’s wheelbase is still longer than that of a Chrysler 300.

This, along with an overall width greater than most mid-size SUVs (76.7 inches) and a steering wheel the size of a manhole cover, makes the Wraith feel predictably enormous. The sensation was exacerbated by our test route, made up largely of English country lanes. To our consternation, they appeared to be only about the width of 1.2 Wraiths.

Yet you pretty quickly get used to guiding this blunt-nosed boat using a light touch on the thin-rimmed wheel. Despite the BMW origins of its mechanical bits and the fact that its chassis was tuned by a man named Peter Kunzinger (who also tuned the BMW Z8 in an earlier life), the Wraith’s deportment is sort of the antithesis of stereotypical German tuning. Its steering is light and friction-free, though still accurate and tactile. And the mien of its suspension (which consists of multilink front and rear wheel attachments, air springs, electronically controlled dampers, and automatically adjusting anti-roll bars) is likewise free and easy.

The big body is allowed to move around a bit, front to rear and side to side, but it doesn’t bob or wallow. It’s all very gently controlled. And despite wearing 45-series tires up front and 40-series in the back, the Wraith doesn’t trouble its passengers with small, high-frequency impacts. In fact, to our backsides, the Wraith’s ride quality felt better than that of its bigger, less sporty brother, the Ghost sedan.

We got some time with the car on the historic Goodwood race circuit, not so much to put down hot laps but more to get away from oncoming traffic and England’s nasty curb stones. Here is what we remember most: habitually going too fast. We would have sworn on the grave of someone’s mother that we’d kept a lid on it, but the speedometer told a different tale. Luckily, the brakes, with big 14.7-inch (front) and 14.6-inch (rear) discs, work brilliantly to haul down a four-seat car that weighs as much as a full-size pickup truck. Mind you, we didn’t run many consecutive laps. But know that, driven like a gentleman, the Wraith is capable of a surprisingly appalling pace.

The Wraith’s eight-speed automatic transmission is said to know what sort of roads lie ahead (informed by the car’s navigation system), and it prepares itself for upcoming turns and expressway on-ramps accordingly. We’re not sure how we would know if this works or not, since there is no way of turning it off. But we can at least say that the transmission shifts very smoothly.

Ah, but a Rolls-Royce is as much about the plush interior as it is about function, right? Sure. And here the Wraith doesn’t disappoint, either. Its leather is predictably buttery, and its eyeball-like HVAC vents are heavy, chromed metal balls that roll around smoothly in their sockets. The scattershot placement of buttons and screens to control the wealth of electronic doodads indicates that it’s not easy to simultaneously look like royalty and a techie at the same time. Oh, and the wood! By now you know of the absurd care and attention the wood veneers receive at a place like Rolls-Royce.

But the company has stepped up its timber game by making essentially whole door panels out of a beautiful piece of bent wood. Our test car wore Santos Palisander—a stunning variety of Bolivian rosewood—and two other varieties of veneer are available. Regardless of which you choose, the grain is set at a 55-degree angle, and the way the leather-covered armrest floats in the middle of all this pulpy goodness might represent the single best use of a tree in any car at any time in history. If you must know, the two rear seats will accommodate adults.

There is no way to justify the cost of a roughly $300,000 car, unless, of course, you have $300,000. That’s about where the Wraith will start, significantly higher than the cost of the Bentley Continental GT. But let’s say you want a headliner with 1340 individual fiber-optic lights to simulate the starry firmament, all inserted and trimmed by hand. Well, that’ll be $12,925 more. If you want the Santos Palisander–covered door panels, budget for another $12,500. And maybe none of the five upper-body and 29 lower-body paint color options is to your liking. More money.

In fact, the Rolls folk estimate that a heavily bespoke (they love that word!) Wraith will add about 30 percent to the cost of the car. But, hey, it’s pretty much as close as even very rich people will get to a true coachbuilt vehicle in the modern car world.